Abstract

If our culture is to be sustainable, if our world can be healed, we need to be able to come up with new ways of relating to one another and the world. Perhaps art can do more than give aesthetic pleasure. Audre Lorde distinguishes poetry from rhetoric and tells us “poetry is not a luxury.” Heidegger’s “poesis” points to an “Open” that could imply what Merleau-Ponty calls a “truth of tomorrow”: a way to envisage a new future. The paper explores two cases, the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the RiverCube project initiated by artist/philosopher Bob Johnson. This involved participating in collecting trash from a river and its banks which is made into a “Denkmal.” These examples suggest possibilities of living differently.